Betty MacDonald Fan Club. Join fans of the beloved writer Betty MacDonald (1907-58). The original Betty MacDonald Fan Club and literary Society. Welcome to Betty MacDonald Fan Club and Betty MacDonald Society - the official Betty MacDonald Fan Club Website with members in 40 countries.
Betty MacDonald, the author of The Egg and I and the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle Series is beloved all over the world. Don't miss Wolfgang Hampel's Betty MacDonald biography and his very witty interviews on CD and DVD!

Thursday, February 4, 2016

Betty MacDonald, Claire Dederer, Anybody can do anything and Sweden

Mary Bard Jensen and Betty MacDonald

Claire Dederer, Author of Poser : My Life In Twenty-Three Yoga Poseslives in Seattle and writes about books and culture for the New York Times, Vogue, Newsday, and many other publications.

Dear Betty MacDonald fan club fans,

I knew of the Betty MacDonald Fan Club but didn't know its activities were so extensive.That's wonderful.

I
checked in with the magazine and they said please feel free to reprint
or repost.

I will keep you updated if I do any more pieces on Betty.

Thanks so much for all you are doing!

All the best,

Claire Dederer

Second Read — January / February 2011 Her Great Depression

Re-reading Betty MacDonald’s Anybody Can Do Anything, on the Northwest’s bust years

By Claire Dederer

From
the time I was nine or ten, I carried a spiral-bound Mead notebook with
me at all times. I wanted to be a writer, felt I probably already was a
writer, and feared I would never be a writer. I was constantly looking
for clues that would tell me that someone like me, someone from Seattle,
someone who was a girl, someone who was no one, might be able to write a
book. A book that got published.

I was always on the lookout for
a message, something that would tell me that this thing could be done. I
realize now that what I was looking for was an influence. Influence is a
message about what is possible, sent by book from one writer to
another. Different writers are looking for different messages. As a
child, the message I sought was simple: This place is worth writing
about.

Just as I was a nobody, Seattle at that time was a
non-place in literature. This was the 1970s. There were few nationally
published authors from Seattle. Whenever I encountered any writing at
all about the Northwest, I fell upon it gratefully. I was happy to read
anything that had blackberries and Puget Sound and Douglas firs and the
names of the streets downtown. I read Richard Brautigan stories; Ken
Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, though I didn’t even pretend to enjoy
it; collections of columns by crabby old Seattle Post-Intelligencer
newspapermen of the 1950s; poems by Carolyn Kizer. I read Tom Robbins
and was embarrassed by the sex. I read Mary McCarthy’s first memoir, but
she seemed to hate the place.

And, eventually, I read Betty
MacDonald. She had been there all along, on my own shelves, in the form
of her familiar, tattered Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books. Then, browsing my
mother’s shelves one summer afternoon, I came upon a grown-up book by
MacDonald: Anybody Can Do Anything.

I had seen it before but
assumed it belonged to the dreary crop of self-help books that had
mushroomed on my mother’s shelves over the past few years. Bored enough,
I picked it up—and found therein an enchanted world. Enchanted because
it was exactly real. Anybody Can Do Anything is Betty MacDonald’s story
of how she and her family weathered the Depression in an old wood-frame
house (not unlike my family’s) in the University District (just a mile
or two from where I lived). And though my historical circumstances were
very different from hers, our shared geography was enough to make me
feel that I was seeing my life reflected in her pages.

It’s funny
to think of a time when Betty MacDonald’s books were new to me. Over
the years I would come to know them the way I knew houses in my own
neighborhood—with a casual intimacy. MacDonald began writing toward the
end of her short life, in the 1940s, when she had found happiness with
her second husband on their blackberry-ridden acreage on Vashon Island
in Puget Sound. Her first book was The Egg and I, set in the 1920s. This chronicle of MacDonald’s life on an Olympic Peninsula chicken farm with
her first husband would become her most famous book, make her a
fortune, and form the basis of a wildly successful 1947 film. This,
putting aside her books for children, was followed by The Plague and I, a
surprisingly entertaining account of her stint in a tuberculosis
sanitarium just north of Seattle. How she created a ripping yarn out of
lying in bed for a year is one of life’s mysteries. Next came Anybody
Can Do Anything, which I held in my hands. Finally she wrote Onions in
the Stew, about life on Vashon Island, which came in 1955, just three
years before she succumbed to cancer at the age of forty-nine.

But
it was Anybody Can Do Anything, with its Seattle locale and its
scrappy, cheerful message of survival, which spoke most directly to me.

As
the book opens and the Depression begins, MacDonald has been living on
the chicken farm in damp exile from her real life in Seattle. Married at
twenty, she had followed her husband to the Olympic Peninsula so he
could live his agrarian dream. Now she has reached her breaking point
with the rain, the chickens, the monomaniacal husband, the whole affair.
“Finally in March, 1931, after four years of this,” she recounts, “I
wrote to my family and told them that I hated chickens, I was lonely and
I seemed to have married the wrong man.” She snatches up her little
daughters and makes her long, rainy, difficult way back to the city by
foot, bus, and ferry.

There she and her girls are folded happily
back into her large family’s bosom. Her mother’s “eight-room
brown-shingled house in the University district was just a modest
dwelling in a respectable neighborhood, near good schools and adequate
for an ordinary family. To me that night, and always, that shabby house
with its broad welcoming porch, dark woodwork, cluttered dining-room
plate rail, large fragrant kitchen, easy book-filled firelit living
room, four elastic bedrooms…represents the ultimate in charm, warmth and
luxury.”

The book describes life in that teeming, cozy household
with her mother, her three sisters, her brother, and her two little
girls, plus whoever else might be sleeping over in one of those elastic
bedrooms. It also details the literally dozens of weird and
none-too-wonderful jobs that MacDonald held throughout the Depression:
hapless secretary to businessmen of every stripe, fur-coat model, photo
retoucher, rabbit rancher, firewood stealer, Christmas tree decorator,
baby sitter, receptionist to a gangster.

The author jumps from
job to job, with whole industries blowing up behind her as she leaves,
like Tom Cruise running from an exploding warehouse. She’s hustled along
in the ever-shrinking job market by her sister Mary, who considers
herself an “executive thinker.”

Mary has a job ready for Betty
as soon as she gets off the bus from the egg farm, never mind that Betty
is utterly unqualified. Mary won’t hear of such talk. She is quick to
admonish her sister: “There are plenty of jobs but the trouble with most
people, and I know because I’m always getting jobs for my friends, is
that they stay home with the covers pulled up over their heads waiting
for some employer to come creeping in looking for them.”

The
truth of this statement is disproved throughout the book. There were
certainly not plenty of jobs. The portrait of Depression-era Seattle
that emerges is definitively—though quietly—desperate. But on my first
read, I hardly clocked the despair. I just thrilled to the evocation of
my home, captured in such throwaway phrases as, “There was nothing in
sight but wet pavement and wet sky.” MacDonald describes places that
still existed, that I myself knew—the I. Magnin’s at the corner of Sixth
and Pine, the palatial movie theater named the Neptune. Here she is on
the Pike Place Market:

The Public Market, about three blocks
long, crowded and smelling deliciously of baking bread, roasting
peanuts, coffee, fresh fish and bananas, blazed with the orange, reds,
yellows and greens of fresh succulent fruits and vegetables. From the
hundreds of farmer’s stalls that lined both sides of the street and
extended clear through the block on the east side, Italians, Greeks,
Norwegians, Finns, Danes, Japanese and Germans offered their wares. The
Italians were the most voluble but the Japanese had the most beautiful
vegetables.

Such descriptions caused a strange firing in my
brain. I was accustomed to imagining locations from books; there was a
deep pleasure in having that necessity for once removed. Even the food
they ate was the food we ate. For special treats, MacDonald tells of
buying Dungeness crabs and Olympia oysters, just as my family did.

I
saw, illustrated perfectly, and in the cold light of nonfiction, the
possibility that Seattle might be the setting for a book. I would not be
struck so thoroughly by the possibility of a true Northwest literature
until I started reading Raymond Carver in the mid-1980s. My mother
told me that Betty MacDonald had died in the 1950s, but that her niece
lived in our very own neighborhood. I walked by the house, gazing at it
with a true feeling of awe: the niece of an author lived therein! Of
course I knew authors were real people. But Betty MacDonald was more
than real; she was tangible. She was prima facie evidence that the
materials I had at hand—those trees, that rain—were enough.

Other
writers came and went; Betty MacDonald was among those who endured for
me. This was because she was funny. No, that’s not quite right. Though I
didn’t have the language for it when I first read her, Betty MacDonald
was comic. As I became a writer myself, I studied her, trying to figure
out just how she did it.

She wrote long, ridiculous set pieces
about her various jobs. She wrote hilarious portraits of her bosses, who
in her hands become one long parade of human oddity. She wrote fondly
of her family’s eccentricities. But above all, she wrote with unflagging
self-abasement. Her books twanged with the idea that one’s own
ridiculousness was comedy enough. A good example of her rueful tone: Until
I started to night school, my life was one long sweep of mediocrity.
While my family and friends were enjoying the distinction of being
labeled the prettiest, most popular, best dancer, fastest runner,
highest diver, longest breath-holder-under-water, best tennis player,
most fearless, owner of the highest arches, tiniest, wittiest, most
efficient, one with the most allergies or highest salaried, I had to
learn to adjust to remarks such as, “My, Mary has the most beautiful red
hair I’ve ever seen, it’s just like burnished copper and so silky and
curly—oh yes, Betty has hair too, hasn’t she? I guess it’s being so
coarse is what makes it look so thick.”

It almost goes without saying that she distinguishes herself in night school by being the absolute worst student in every class.MacDonald
was master of the comic memoirist’s first art: self-deprecation. Other
types of memoirists value lyricism, or shock tactics. Comic memoirists
are utterly dependent on knowing that they themselves are the silliest
people in any given room. I know whereof I speak—I am this year
publishing a memoir about my own very, very ordinary life. Memoirists
like me are writing what author Lorraine Adams has called “nobody”
memoirs. As she said in a 2002 piece in the Washington Monthly, such
memoirists are “neither generals, statesmen, celebrities, nor their
kin.”How, then, to proceed? You’re nobody. You want to write a
memoir. Your first order of business is to let readers know that you
know that they know you’re a nobody. So you must imply your unimportance
as quickly as possible, and never, ever stop. By means of that simple
dynamic, the memoirist makes a friend rather than an enemy of her
reader.

In Anybody Can Do Anything, MacDonald fails again and
again. It’s an entire book about failure: her own, and the economy’s.
It’s also about persisting in the face of one’s own admitted
shortcomings. What she wants is a job commensurate with her skills,
which she presents as nil: “I wanted some sort of very steady job with a
salary, and duties mediocre enough to be congruent with my mediocre
ability. I had in mind sort of a combination janitress, slow typist and
file clerk.” Finally, she washes up safely on the sandbar of
government work, taking a job at the Seattle branch of the National
Recovery Administration, the New Deal agency started in 1933 and charged
with organizing businesses under new fair-trade codes. There she felt
right at home, surrounded by federal-level incompetence: “There were
thousands of us who didn’t know what we were doing but were all doing it
in ten copies.” MacDonald is rarely remembered for her wry tone.
When she’s remembered at all, she is preceded not by her own reputation,
but that of the big-screen version of The Egg and I, starring Claudette
Colbert and Fred MacMurray, which is pretty nearly unwatchable. In the
film, Ma and Pa Kettle—neighbors who are fondly, if broadly, drawn in
the book—have been turned into tobacco-spitting, raccoon-roasting
caricatures. And the public loved them. On the movie poster, the faces
of these two crackers loom huge; Colbert and MacMurray cower tinily in
the corner. Ma and Pa Kettle proved so popular that nine more films were
made about them and their fictional fifteen children, and Betty
MacDonald lost all hope of being taken seriously as a writer.

Many
years after all of this, I was having dinner with a British writer who
had undertaken to write about the Northwest. “You have to be careful
about using too much humor, otherwise you end up sounding like Betty
MacDonald: housewife humor,” he said, finishing in scathing (if posh)
tones. MacDonald has been trapped in this role of domestic lightweight.
But her writing, with its quiet irreverence, has more in common with,
say, Calvin Trillin or Laurie Colwin, than it does with a mid-century
housewife humorist like Erma Bombeck. (Though, really, what’s so bad
about Erma Bombeck?)

What MacDonald models in her writing is
actually very freeing—self-deprecation as a kind of passport to the
ordinary. With it, you can take your reader into the most mundane
details of your life, and they will often go.

I teach adult
writing students. When we work on memoir, they want to write pieces
about what they’ve achieved. About their good marriages. About their
sterling qualities. “Nobody wants to hear about that except your
mother!” I tell them. Which is never very popular. Even so, I try to
explain the Betty MacDonald principle to them: what people want to see
in the memoir are reflections of their own failures and smallnesses. If
you can show readers that you have those same failures, those same
smallnesses, and make them laugh about it, they will love you. Or at
least like you. Or at least accept you as a fellow nobody.

These
simple things would be enough for me: a story of Seattle; a tale told
with self-deprecating humor. But what MacDonald achieves in Anybody Can
Do Anything is something more than that: a finely observed journalistic
record of her time. The ridiculous set pieces, the fond portraits of
her family, and what New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called the
“earthy tang” of her writing do not seem like indicators of a work of
serious journalism. But MacDonald is getting down on paper what she sees
happening all across Seattle, and ultimately providing us with a rough
draft of history. The details of home and work life accrue, anecdotes
pile up, and suddenly the reader has a real sense of daily existence in
the West during the 1930s. This is a cheerful, unassuming way of
documenting a socially and economically turbulent period. But it’s
documentation nonetheless.

Take, for example, MacDonald’s
account of one of her earliest jobs. This chapter encapsulates the
uneasiness of the early part of the Depression, eerily suggestive of the
economic tenterhooks we’ve been on since 2007. She’s been summarily
fired from her first job as executive secretary to a miner, so the
ever-resourceful Mary has found her a job at her own office, where she
works for a lumber magnate. When Betty protests that she hasn’t any of
the qualifications the lumberman is looking for in a secretary, Mary
tells her not to fret. “‘You thought you couldn’t learn mining,’ Mary
told me when she installed me as her assistant in the office across the
street. ‘There’s nothing to lumber, it’s just a matter of being able to
divide everything by twelve.’?”

As she makes her way to work each
morning, MacDonald is nervous but glad of the work: “Now I grew more
and more conscious of the aimlessness and sadness of the people on the
streets, of the Space for Rent signs, marking the sudden death of
businesses, that had sprung up over the city like white crosses on the
battlefield and I lifted myself up each morning timidly and with dread.”
Her employer’s business is clearly failing, but MacDonald feels she
shouldn’t leave her boss, Mr. Chalmers, in the lurch. She intends to
stay until the end. “And I did,” we read, “in spite of Mr. Chalmers’
telling me many times that the Depression was all my fault, the direct
result of inferior people like me wearing silk stockings and thinking
they were as good as people like him.” Again, this blame-the-victim
language recalls some of the rhetoric of today’s subprime mortgage
crisis. But despite the boss’s efforts to draw a sociological line in
the sand, he too is laid low by the economic downturn, and the chapter
comes to an abrupt end: “Lumber was over.”

The author and her
family soon lose their phone service, their electricity, their heat.
Being Betty MacDonald, she makes it all sound rather jolly. She tells of
endless bowls of vegetable soup eaten by candlelight. And when she
complains about being broke, she does it with typical good humor: “There
is no getting around the fact that being poor takes getting used to.
You have to adjust to the fact that it’s no longer a question of what
you eat but if you eat.” But sometimes the details tell the story
that the tone masks. When the heat and the electricity have been turned
off, the family relies upon old Christmas candles for light and firewood
for heat: “When we ran out of fireplace wood, Mary unearthed a bucksaw
and marched us all down to a city park two blocks away, where we took
turns sawing up fallen logs.” Here, despite the characteristic pluck,
you feel straits getting uncomfortably dire.This isn’t an overlay of
social commentary sitting awkwardly atop a narrative. Instead, such
commentary is tightly knitted to MacDonald’s own experience. When she
notices that “[e]very day found a little better class of people selling
apples on street corners,” she’s not making an idle observation—she’s
wondering if she’s next.

When I came to write my own memoir, I
was telling a small, personal story about being a mom at the turn of the
millennium. I wanted to link the story to larger cultural forces I had
observed, to what I saw as a kind of generational obsession with perfect
parenting. In Betty MacDonald’s writing, I once again found just the
model I needed. It was possible to connect the larger story around me to
my own small story, without pretending to be definitive or historical.
In fact, the more I focused on the details of my own very particular
experience, the more I could give a feeling of the culture that I swam
in.

The message that Betty Macdonald sent me, through this book,
is one of sufficiency: Your small life is enough. Other writers might
be looking for a message that will feed their huge ambitions. From
books, they learn how far they might go with their own writing. For me,
the question has always been: How close to home might I stay?MacDonald’s
qualities as a writer—the focus on the very local, the self-deprecating
humor, the careful and personal observation of social changes—are
modest qualities. They inspire through their very humility. The homely,
says Betty MacDonald, is more than enough. This was the message I needed
to hear. There’s a clue, of course, right there in the title. It’s been
telling me since I was a girl, right up through the time I became a
writer myself: Anybody can do anything. Even this. Even you.

Such
lack of pretension doesn’t necessarily come with great rewards. There
are no monuments to Betty MacDonald. No endowed chairs, no scholarships,
not even a public library conference room named after her. But in the
shallow green bowl of Chimacum Valley, a two-lane road leads to the
chicken farm where MacDonald lived for four tough years. It’s been
renamed “The Egg and I Road.” It veers west from Route 19, cutting
through farmland before heading up a hill into some evergreens. It’s
nothing special. It’s just ordinary. It’s just a county road.

Is
there a sharper knife that tears at the fabric of society than the
threat of physical violence on the basis of ethnicity, nationality,
gender or political affiliation? The recent images of young men, wearing
hoods and dressed in black, roaming the streets of central Stockholm looking for “north African street children” to “punish” for their mere existence reminded Sweden and the world of the worst elements of European history.People immediately took to social media to express their shock that
this could happen in a country like Sweden. Or, to be more accurate, Sweden as they imagine it to be.

Tragically, these are images the world is accustomed to seeing. But
not from Sweden, a country with a global reputation for egalitarianism,
the recognition of human rights and support for international justice.
With the restriction on the intake of refugees in late 2015, the announcement that up to 80,000 asylum seekers
could be returned to their countries of origin, and now the threat of
street violence, the image of the country as a bastion of tolerance and
progressive politics has been ruined. It’s unclear whether it can ever
recover.When huge numbers of refugees and migrants braved the Mediterranean
in search of a better life last year, Sweden took in nearly 200,000 of
them. For a nation of 10 million this intake was massive, shaming many
larger EU countries that claimed they were not able to help. This
magnanimity was held up as a glowing example of the best of Swedish
social democracy. While other countries made excuses and procrastinated,
Sweden put its money where its mouth was.

And this wasn’t the first time. After Iraq was bombed into the ground a decade ago, Sweden took in huge numbers of Iraqi refugees
while the US accepted just a trickle from the country it had destroyed.
After the US supported the overthrow of the democratically elected
Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, leading to the brutal Augusto
Pinochet regime, it was Sweden that accepted political refugees from
that country. The list goes on.

The memory of this history – and the feel-good afterglow of Sweden’s
recent humanitarian efforts with the Syrian refugees – has quickly
evaporated, replaced by the image of a country no different from its
European fellows. That may not be entirely fair (Sweden is still one of
the largest per capita foreign aid providers in the world), but – as
with many countries – much of Sweden’s image is a mixture of facts, half-truths and mythology.

When the far-right, anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats first entered parliament in 2010 with 5.7% of the vote, many described them as nothing more than a one-issue “protest party”. Six years later, they have just over 18%,
while the Social Democrats – the party of slain prime minister Olof
Palme – languish at 23%, their lowest number since polls began. The
thought that there would be just five percentage points between the two
parties would once have seemed ridiculous.

This
is an existential social and political crisis for Sweden. While the
number of gang members searching for “non-Swedes” to attack in Stockholm
a few nights ago was only around 100, their actions reverberated around
the country, and the world.Vigilante street violence is disturbing at many levels. It is
disturbing because it suggests that clusters of citizens have abandoned
their belief in the efficacy of the democratic system, and have decided
to take the law into their own hands.It is disturbing because debate and argument have been abandoned in
favour of brute force. And it is disturbing because it suggests the
potential erosion of the social and ethical rules by which ordinary
citizens operate on a daily basis, and by which large groups of people
can live together in the usually tense but occasionally wonderful places
we call cities.This is not the Sweden the world knows. This is not the Sweden many Swedes know. This is a Sweden no one knows.

About Me

Betty MacDonald Fan Club, founded by Wolfgang Hampel, has members in 40 countries.
Wolfgang Hampel, author of Betty MacDonald biography interviewed Betty MacDonald's family and friends. His Interviews have been published on CD and DVD by Betty MacDonald Fan Club. If you are interested in the Betty MacDonald Biography or the Betty MacDonald Interviews send us a mail, please.
Several original Interviews with Betty MacDonald are available.
We are also organizing international Betty MacDonald Fan Club Events for example, Betty MacDonald Fan Club Eurovision Song Contest Meetings in Oslo and Düsseldorf, Royal Wedding Betty MacDonald Fan Club Event in Stockholm and Betty MacDonald Fan Club Fifa Worldcup Conferences in South Africa and Germany.
Betty MacDonald Fan Club Honour Members are Monica Sone, author of Nisei Daughter and described as Kimi in Betty MacDonald's The Plague and I, Betty MacDonald's nephew, artist and writer Darsie Beck, Betty MacDonald fans and beloved authors and artists Gwen Grant, Letizia Mancino, Perry Woodfin, Traci Tyne Hilton, Tatjana Geßler, music producer Bernd Kunze, musician Thomas Bödigheimer, translater Mary Holmes and Mr. Tigerli.